Here's Why You Love Facebook's News Feed Even If You Think You Hate It

In the time before news feed, the Web was a strange, quiet, and
probably very lonely place. I say “probably” because I can
barely remember the way things worked back then. After Facebook
launched news feed, nothing on the Web would ever be the same
again.

Get this: Before news feed, which launched seven years ago this
month, you could post a picture or some other personal detail
somewhere—your Facebook or MySpace or Friendster page, Flickr,
Blogger, LiveJournal—and be reasonably sure that it would
remain just there, unseen by pretty much everyone you knew.

The only way someone might find it is by checking your page.
Sure, some people would do that—but everyone had scores of
connections online, so no one was checking each of their
friends’ pages. The net effect was solitude.
In The Facebook Effect, David
Kirkpatrick’s history of Facebook’s early years, Chris Cox,
who’s now the company’s vice president of product, recounts the
founding idea for news feed: “The Internet could help you
answer a million questions, but not the most important one, the
one you wake up with every day: How are the people doing that I
care about?”

Looking back, it’s clear that news feed is one of the most
important, influential innovations in the recent history of the
Web. News feed forever altered our relationship to personal
data, turning everything we do online into a little message for
friends or the world to consume. You might not like this
trend—or, at least, you might claim you
don’t like this trend. But the stats prove you probably do.
News feed is the basis for Facebook’s popularity, the thing
that initially set it apart from every other social network,
and the reason hundreds of millions of us go back to the site
every day.

But news feed is bigger than that. Either directly or
indirectly, it’s the inspiration for just about every
social-media feature that has come along since. News feed
paved the way for Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, Flipboard,
and Quora—for every site that thrives off of the communities
created by lots of people’s individual contributions. News
feed changed the media (it’s hard to
imagine BuzzFeedwithout it), advertising,
politics, and, to the extent that it altered how we all talk
to one another, society itself.

Yes, that sounds over-important. But consider this: Thanks to
news feed, I learned today that that this one dude I barely
knew in high school just had a baby. I know what his
half-clothed wife looked like just after labor. I’ve seen his
mother-in-law. I’ve seen his infant daughter. Is such forced,
daily, crushing intimacy good or bad for the world? None of
us can say for sure yet. Either way, though, it’s hugely
consequential—because we now know everything about everyone,
the way we relate to one another has changed enormously, and
permanently.

News feed was born on Sept. 5, 2006. Facebook announced the
feature in a short, straightforward blog
post that offered no hints of the magnitude of the
change coming to the site. At the time, Facebook was still
available only to students and others with select email
addresses. It had around 10 million active users, meaning it
was dwarfed by other social networks, especially MySpace.
(Facebook opened itself up to everyone later that September.)

“News Feed … updates a personalized list of news stories
throughout the day, so you'll know when Mark adds Britney
Spears to his Favorites or when your crush is single again,”
Ruchi Sanghvi, then a Facebook product manager, wrote in the
announcement. By bringing everyone’s news to you, Facebook’s
engineers reasoned, news feed would make Facebook much easier
to use. Sanghvi added: “These features are not only different
from anything we've had on Facebook before, but they're quite
unlike anything you can find on the web.”

She was right. News feed was different—so different that
people immediately hated it. News feed sparked the first of
many major privacy firestorms for Facebook, the first time
people questioned how the information they were posting on
the site might be used by others. A few days after it
launched, amid a storm of protest, Mark Zuckerberg posted a mea
culpa (also the first of many) in which he promised
to tweak Facebook’s privacy controls to mitigate some
people’s worries. But Facebook didn’t get rid of news feed,
because however loudly people protested, the company could
see that people loved it.

By turning a series of lonely events into something like a
story—by combining all your friends’ actions into a
community, or even a conversation, on your home page—news
feed gave Facebook a soul. Thanks to news feed, people
started finding one another and working together in ways that
had never happened on the site before. “Before news feed, you
could join groups, but discovering them was not super easy,”
Cox explained at a recent Facebook press event. “Within a
period of two weeks after the news feed launch we had the
first group with over a million people—which means a million
people had seen the group and taken an action to join it.”
There’s a punch line to this story that’s a testament to our
enduring ambivalence about news feed. The first Facebook
group that news feed propelled to million-plus membership was
a protest against News Feed.

In the years since its launch, Facebook has constantly
changed both the appearance and the mechanics behind news
feed, and the current version is the product of one of the
most complex computational processes you deal with on a
regular basis. Facebook has always tried to present only a
subset of the stuff people are posting—the posts it thinks
you’re most likely to like. In its earliest incarnation,
engineers tuned news feed manually, tweaking the frequency of
certain kinds of posts—more pictures, fewer news stories—in
response to user engagement. Later on, they developed a more
formal algorithm, sometimes called EdgeRank, which took into account broad
factors about people’s relationships in deciding what showed
up on your feed. (For example, EdgeRank might determine that
a photo from your mom is more important than a news story
from your friend, partly based on information that Facebook’s
engineers had hard-coded into the system.)

But EdgeRank wasn’t sophisticated enough. Ideally, everyone’s
ranking algorithm should be personalized, and news feed
should recognize those preferences and tweak our stories
accordingly. “A few years ago, we stopped working on
EdgeRank, and started working on a machine-learning
approach,” says Serkan Piantino, the engineer who worked on
some of news feed’s earliest ranking systems. Now, every time
you load up news feed, the new system takes thousands of
factors into account to present a feed that is personalized
to your tastes. The machine-learned algorithm constantly
tweaks itself based on how you interact with it: If you
click like on a lot of memes, you’re going
to see more of those. For every user, the system has to
instantly analyze and rank an average of 1,500 posts every
time the site is reloaded.

And engineers keep making the system more complex. Lars
Backstrom, the engineering manager for news feed ranking,
says that one of his team’s current goals is to get news feed
to present information that hasn’t been explicitly shared by
your friends. For instance, say you love Ricky Gervais, but
none of your friends care for him. They aren’t likely to post
anything about his new Netflix show—but given what news
feed’s ranking system knows about your interests, it should
determine that you might like Willa Paskin’s review
of Derek more than you might like,
say, another post about your mom’s friend’s visit to the
Hamptons. “If something really interesting happens in the
world, we should know enough about you to pull that in even
if you haven’t explicitly connected to it,” Backstrom says.

He adds that news feed doesn’t really do this yet, “because
we aren’t very good at it.” But the fact that Facebook is
working on this problem illustrates the scale of its
ambitions for news feed. Facebook doesn’t just want to be the
front page for your social life; ultimately, it wants to be
the one place online you check for everything you care about.

You can question whether this is good for society. One
persistent worry about the news feed approach to information
is the Filter Bubble critique—the idea
that by engaging only with stuff that’s been algorithmically
determined to appeal to us, we’re all tunneling into echo
chambers of our own preferences. I explored that
critique in my own book,
though research into the question has since
shown that the bubble is, thankfully, more porous than we
might fear.

Another critique of news feed is that it has turned us all
into narcissists, and worse, that it’s making us depressed about how much better
everyone else’s life is. The trouble with that critique
is that News Feed is only a reflection of your own
interaction with it: If it’s serving up stuff that makes you
sad, it’s only because that’s the stuff you’re most engaged
with. If it’s true that news feed drives us crazy, we
theoretically have the power to fix it. The news feed we have
is the news feed we deserve.